Creating Christmas

Geraldine Doogue shows how the celebration of our Australian Christmas is the outcome of many influences in history, and how its symbols and gesture derive from some very unusual sources.

Full Transcript Available

Broadcast:
Wed 25 Dec 2002, 8:30pm

Published:
Wed 25 Dec 2002, 8:30pm

Transcript

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Creating Christmas

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to our Christmas day edition of Compass, I'm Geraldine Doogue.

Now in this program we're going to take a look at some of the ways we Aussies have celebrated Christmas over the years. How we've adapted the ways of our European forebears to make Christmas in Australia our very own. We also look at where this great celebration is going, and what it means in our increasingly secular world. And for those of you who might find themselves by the ever present commercial pressures of the season well, there is cause for hope....

James Tulip

Writer and critic

Christmas is a climax. It's a climax of our work year, our education year, our sporting year. And when that climax is reached we drop our bundles as it were and go off to the beach. And that's a totally different experience from the rest of the world, or at least the northern hemisphere. And that's what I feel Australia has stumbled into you might say, a cultural Christmas.

NARR:

The so called cultural Christmas in Australia had a very low key beginning. The first recorded Christmas dinner in the country took place in Governor Philip's modest residence at Sydney Cove in December 1788. Philip was not a religious man, but he saw value in the established Church of England maintaining the status quo and subordinating the lower classes.

So, on Christmas day, a service was dutifully conducted by the chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, and the small colonial elite celebrated with the Governor.

"Christmas Day was observed with proper ceremony. Mr Johnson preached a sermon adapted to the occasion and the major part of the officers of the settlement were afterward entertained at dinner by the Governor."

David Collins, Captain of Marines and Judge Advocate 1788

NARR:

We don't know what they ate, probably salt beef and pork from the stores. Food was in short supply as the early harvests failed.

For the majority of convicts and others, the relative insignificance of Christmas Day was the norm even in England.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

The poorer classes would have had very little memory at all of Christmas. And not even holiday, they would have worked, so they were used to a spartan sort of a Christmas. But the other classes were used to a pre-Victorian Christmas which was fantastic, but it was different. There were no Christmas tree, there was no, there were carols but no stockings, no postcards, a lot of the things that we do.

NARR:

Austere our first Christmas may have been for the lower classes , it seems some were determined to celebrate albeit in an unusual way.

On Christmas eve an arrangement between two convict women and two marines was noted by one observer who wrote:

"Amelia Levy and Elizabeth Fowles spent the night with Corporal Plowman and Corporal Winstead in return for a shirt each."

NARR: :

Among early colonial accounts we glimpse another morally dubious attempt to bring some jollity to the day.

The Sydney Gazette of December 1803 reported:

"During the last fortnight, a number of pigs have been reported absent, nor do we hear that any have thought proper to make their appearance; whence it may be supposed that most, if not all of these stragglers will receive warm invitations to a Christmas dinner."

NARR:

The celebration of Christmas took a leap forward when the young Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. She brought a German husband and a German custom, the Christmas tree.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

I used to think everything we did came from Christianity. You know the tree, well Christ started on the tree of the cross and there were the lights, the candles and that was Christ is the light of the world and we had holidays because to celebrate and gifts because of the magi. That's all nonsense. That was all Roman and they had a holiday and they had Christmas dinner and they had all through Europe you had bonfires on the 25th December and 25th June, and they gave presents. All those things come, they're pre-Christian, I hate "Pagan", they're pre-Christian. And that's largely what Queen Victoria revived.

NARR:

The Australian colonies soon modelled themselves on what came out of England during the nineteenth century.

James Tulip

Writer and critic

We did try to imitate the English in our Christmases. But then there's also the other side to the Australian Christmas of distance being so far away from England that we tend to intensify the Englishness of that time. So the festivity would have something of a dark side to it. The festivity would be couched in loneliness, remoteness, anxiety even, to recover that lost world of innocent childhood that people may have known in their English origins.

NARR:

Parallel to this nostalgia came a new Australian style of Christmas celebration that took on board the new environment and the antipodean summer.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

what they discovered of course when they tried to celebrate was that they didn't have the Christmas tree in Australia so much. I mean they certainly didn't have mistletoe so they started to experiment with Australian fauna and flora and so you had the Christmas Bush.

So instead of the holly and the ivy which were essentially winter things, the red berry and the spiky shiny green leaf; they brought in all sorts of Australian flowers and so on, which we could still do today. We don't have to moan about the reverse season, we could use it.

NARR:

The custom of using Australian native "Christmas Bushes" has had to compete over time with plastic and introduced trees.

Another nineteenth century Christmas creation which seems to be lost for the moment was our very own Australian Father Christmas.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

He was a drover and he is wonderful in the cartoons, he can be a sort of a punch figure with a little round face and that sort of thing, or he can be a squatter on his verandah with a bunch of Aborigines - I hesitate to say - sort of lighting his cigar and pouring his wine. So very much late 19th century.

James Tulip

Writer and critic

There was always the sense that the Australian Christmas was incongruous or unusual. And Australians were able to make a joke out of themselves. They were able to enjoy the sense of say Santa Clause tearing his trousers climbing over the barbed wire fence. And that was as big a feature as the kind of innocent nostalgia that was going on in the Christmas time.

The reins are skin of Kangaroo,

The whip of finest Wallaby hide;

His steed, two pairs of fleet emu,

With little fairies four astride.

And all the balmy summer night,

Through forest, camp,and town they ride,

And at every door Santa Claus alights,

Where good girls and boys reside.

Santa Claus, Elizabeth Hardwick, 1874

NARR:

If the weather brought Father Christmas out of his winter clothes, it didn't bring all Australians out of hot kitchens and dining rooms. We even improvised with available food to imitate traditional English fare.

A specially seasoned leg of lamb was dubbed "Colonial Goose". It was this kind of culinary sentimentality which, in 1868, drove the novelist Marcus Clarke to write:

"It may be rank heresy, but I deliberately affirm Christmas in Australia is a giant mistake. The keeping of Christmas is a simple waste of time and money. If a gentleman is sensible and possesses digestive organs, it is quite probable that he will refuse to load his stomach with the portable nightmare known as Christmas pudding, and that he will decline to consider the eating of hot roast beef until his eyelids will no longer wag as a pleasant Christmas duty."

NARR

As if heeding his call, many late nineteenth century Colonial Australians started to go outdoors for cold cuts at Christmas Day picnics. Whatever shape it took the revival of Christmas celebration in the 19th Century embraced the secular commercial culture which is still very familiar.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

What Queen Victoria of course did was, it didn't revive the religious side of Christmas at all, it was a big family dinner, it was a social occasion, it was a family occasion.

NARR

This kind of Christmas culture then, as now, has its critics. Among those who feel something has been lost.

Dorothy Lee

Theologian

I think the church in the Middle Ages in many ways celebrated the whole period of Christmas probably much better than we do these days. Because they took it for a whole season and they celebrated the very hint of the dawning of light in the northern hemisphere. And I think probably that was more of a golden age, even than the 19th century was of Christmas, because the focus was really on God becoming human.

I think already by the 19th Century in Protestant England it's losing its Christian meaning, and it's already becoming a very sentimental event. With a tree that has no meaning to anybody that we decorate. I mean, why do people do that? I think symbols are so precious and so important that they should be saturated with meaning, not meaningless. I don't think we should engage in a meaningless ritual.

NARR:

It may be that a golden or magical Christmas, full of religious meaning, happened so long ago that it's unrealistic to talk of some magical good old days.

"Whatever happened to the magic of Christmas? Well may one ask. Yet perhaps it never was magical. That's a sentimental notion peddled by Christmas card manufacturers and Walt Disney Studios."

Adrian Mitchell, 1989

NARR

Whether or not Christmas cards are merely sentimental, from their inception in the 19th Century, most of them were certainly not religious. It can be argued however, that commercialism like this has made important contributions to the creation of our Christmas.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

I don't think there was much objection in the late 19th Century of earlier about the commercialism involved in Christmas. And my feeling about that there can be an exaggerated objection to that now. People will say well it's just a commercial feast and so on. Commercialism is supply responding to demand, that's all it is.

We have the Christmas tree because somebody planted it and brought it in. We have little glass balls on the tree because largely because F.W. Woolworth when he was 28 in America in 1880, he went out and he bought a whole lot from Lustier in Germany.

We have the cracker on the Christmas table. A fellow called Tom Smith who was a seller of sweets, and he invented the cracker as a way of selling his French sweets on English Christmas tables.

Boy: Two guns and a holster, or lots of cars and a camera and some other things which I don't cause it's got to be a secret hasn't it?

Santa: That's true, it has got to be a secret, but have you got any ideas what that secret should be?

Boy: No!

Santa: And have you been very good?

Boy: Sometimes I'm very good and sometimes I haven't.

Santa: I see, and have you been bad more than you've been good?

Boy: I've been very good and very bad.

Santa: I see, do you think you deserve all these things.

Boy: I don't know.

Santa: You don't know.

Dorothy Lee

Theologian

I think Christmas in Australia has moved right away from a religious festival in many ways, and it's become in some ways a celebration of our material wealth, which I would see as being built on basically the expense of the rest of the world which doesn't share that wealth. So a kind of orgy of consumerism is what it is for all of us, myself included.

John Carroll

Sociologist

The actual Christmas story reminds us in the three wise men bringing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, that the gift is not a material object as such, it is representative of homage to the sacred child by wise men from different cultures. This is a very rich little bit of story in the three wise men bringing the gifts. And it lifts profane consumerist gift giving to a higher plane, as long as we maintain that link.

NARR:

Although the Christmas created out of the colonial template may have, to some, questionable religious credentials, it did establish the enduring custom of a family get together.

James Tulip

Writer and critic

There would be very deliberate festivity happening after the English system of the mid 19th century with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children gathered around as some kind of almost holy family. And something of that is present in Australia, that we did try to imitate the English in our Christmases.

"Bush Christmas", courtesy of Carlton International

MUM: Have another piece of pie Snow

SNOW: No thank you

GIRL: Here's some more pudding

SNOW: No thanks, I'm full!

(Laughter)

DAD: Well, I reckon if Snow's finished, we've all had enough

(Laughter)

Dorothy Lee

Theologian

I think there's no problem with families getting together and celebrating, that's obviously a lovely thing; especially if we take seriously the fact that the family in its traditional way is dying out in our society to some extent.

If we had a broader view of the family that would be fine, but I don't see why it needs to be associated with a religious festival.

John Carroll

Sociologist

The Australian secular Christmas has developed over decades now. I think it is a very important social function, and that function is the bringing together of extended family once a year, and it's the only time in most families where people see aunts, uncles, nephews, grandparents, get together. And this is in a society which is dangerously atomised, where the sense of community is weak, and we have one vital annual event which gives the sense that I'm part of more than my little nuclear family. At this level I think Australia's made a lot of a new reason for having Christmas.

NARR: To some of us, the words "Secular Australian Christmases" may come as no surprise. So, despite the name, how Christian is Christmas and how Christian does it have to be?

Dorothy Lee

Theologian

I think if Christians celebrate, not just the day but the whole season, and make it a much bigger thing that is associated with the whole twelve days of Christmas, then with the climax being on the 6th January, then I think at least Christians have got a chance of recovering the meaning and moving away from the materialism, the gross consumerism of Christmas and the injustice that we perpetrate, or we perpetuate by our consumerism and our materialism.

NARR

The festive season of December was an important time of gift giving and merry making long before Christianity. During roman times it was know as the saturnalia, in which the birth of the sun was celebrated.

Ian Guthridge

Author, "All About Christmas"

Christians for over 300 years after Christ and they celebrated the Roman Saturnalia. It wasn't Pagan to them. Christians from the very beginning have been finding their own leaning for Christmas within the whole range of society. They don't have to go separate, like have a little Christian tent out in the park. I don't like this.

Dorothy Lee

Theologian

It's a sharing in a sense of mystery that both Roman religion had and Christianity had. They had their disagreements but they agreed that there's a sense of mystery and sense of transcendence to life. That is very different from modern secularism that has no sense of mystery, that has no sense of the divine reality.

NARR:

A sense of that "divine reality " is also important to those who value Christmas as a sacred story of profound cultural significance.

John Carroll

Sociologist

The moment that it's forgotten that there were three wise men with their gifts, we lose the shepherds and the night star. We don't have re-enactments of the nativity scene in schools with little donkeys and boys and girls playing the different parts. The more that happens the more the risk is that it will just be another disenchanted consumerist day.

James Tulip

Writer and critic

Religion is a sleeping giant in Australia. It's repressed in many ways in the media, and people tend to believe that that is the case. But at Christmas you have possibly five or six million people going to religious services, and that's a massive way of recognising the power of religion in our society and in our culture.

The challenge to me is to be creative about Christmas and not to try to find alternatives to it. But there certainly are plenty of models in the Australian experience.

What is giving us pleasure in ways that's relevant to the message of Christmas, the message of the new life that's coming in to our world and the quality of that new life. And I think that's, we need to be more celebrating ourselves.

NARR:

One of our more long standing and pleasurable celebrations of Christmas is Carols by candlelight. Some claim the practice originated here in the mid 19th Century among the Cornish and staunchly Methodist copper miners of Moonta in South Australia.

Tallow candles or "fat jacks" were stuck to the front of their hats with a daub of wet clay. The shift captains turned a blind eye as the men took time out of their Christmas eve shifts to gather on the mine platforms and sing by the light of the fat jacks and again the next day with the women in church.

Modern carols by candlelight began in 1938 as radio broadcasts, and by 1970 they were on television.

This might be seen as a take over of a religious celebration by secular culture. But it could also present opportunities for religious expression.

James Tulip

Writer and critic

Always a religion has to express itself through the culture in which it finds itself, and this is especially true in Australia.

I think it has to come out of the churches and join in with the Carols by Candlelight people. So I think that's the future of Christmas here, that it has to embrace the secular much more.

I think that despite of all the secular frenzy that goes on at Christmas time there still is a deeper set of emotions that also flow, and that is the sense of gladness at the gift of life and it's been honoured ultimately by the belief that it is God coming into our world in this form of a child.

Geraldine Doogue

And if that doesn't move you, I don't think anything will.

Now we thought we might leave you this evening with a little something from those pioneer carols by candle light singers, the miners of Moonta. Although the mines closed long ago, the traditions live on through the efforts of South Australia's Cornish Association, so it's their choir tonight who'll sing for you a traditional Cornish carol "The New Born King". It was arranged by the late Johnny Thomas who served as a choir master at Moonta for 40 years during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th Century. And from all of us here at Compass, our very best wishes for Christmas. Goodnight